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3.

I believe the reason the TDP is actually astonishingly low in addition to the Intel design trade-off is the fact that the cores are in-order. Traditionally, in-order cores are both smaller and more energy-efficient due to the smaller logic windows.

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4.

That's true, of course, but that's not the only reason. The Pentium actually executes x86 instructions, unlike all the processors after it, which add decode logic to change the instructions into RISC-like instructions, which are then executed. So, all this space and power is not consumed in the original Pentium class processors.

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5.

One minor correction, modern Intel cpus are based on the P6 core from the Pentium Pro. The P54c is a OK core and most ended up working with no L2 on the bards any way (fake chips) while performance was good enough at that time for DOS gaming and web surfing. Some still find use till this day. They should have gone with the P55C due to the larger L1 Cache which improved performance considerably. The transistor count is very odd, the p54c had what 4.5 million or less transistors each while this has 1.3 billion. So is the network mesh the bulk of the chip? Is the L1 instruction and L1 data unchanged as well? How would performance over all stack up against an over the shelf cpu like the e7200 or a 8250e?

I still keep many of my old cpus including an early unmarked 16mhz 386 with the double symbol. I like my vintage engineering samples and still keep a P55c MMX that is oced to 200mhz.